If Santa can be a savior, salvation means freedom not from sin but from wage labor. In the new plot, the Grinch story unfolds as Cindy Lou Who seeks out Santa to ask him to help her mother, an overworked single mom. The 2018 Grinch movie, narrated by Pharrell Williams, makes this economic theme even more palpable. His plot to steal Christmas takes aim at its frivolous merchandise (“Pop guns! And bicycles! Roller skates! Drums! Checkerboards! Tricycles! Popcorn! And Plums!”) and frippery (“The ribbons! The wrappings! The tags! And the tinsel! The trimmings! The trappings!”). Seuss’s Grinch, the Scrooge of the twentieth century, offered a digestible criticism of the hypocrisy and excess of America’s post-war economic expansion. In his sweeping conceptual history of anti-Jewish thought, the historian David Nirenberg has suggested that “Judaism” has long served as a “category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world.” It was through the category of “Jewishness” that, for instance, Scrooge offered Dickens a tool for criticizing the injustices of his own industrialist world, as the literary scholar Deborah Epstein Nord writes in Victorian Literature and Culture.
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